by Jon Lackman | 16 October 2007 | Books
In the Spring-Summer 2007 issue of Studies in the Decorative Arts, Bernard Jacqué reviews Christine Velut’s book Décors de papier: Production, commerce et usages des papiers peints à Paris, 1750-1820:
A book about wallpaper that is not a general history retailing old clichés is always an event, given that studies on this type of decoration remain so rare. Christine Velut’s work can only be welcomed with curiosity and enthusiasm … In France … two doctoral dissertations dedicated to wallpaper were recently defended. Velut’s was one of them, and here it is published in a shortened and attractive form in order to reach a wide audience … The originality of Velut’s work … lies, on the one hand, in the range of its approaches and, on the other, in its emphasis on one — the method of her dissertation advisor, Daniel Roche, who has pursued what he calls “the history of banal things” … things that now seem ordinary to us, but that at the time were milestones in the new phenomenon of consumerism … One can only hope that someday a similar book will be written about English wallpaper of the eighteenth century, which is still a veritable black hole for historians.
